Matt DeButts

Fake it til you make it. Journalist, Comm PhD at @stanford. Formerly @stanfordhai @latimes @PKU1898 @AmherstCollege

[Emily Feng 冯哲芸 @EmilyZFeng]

Absolutely not surprising but a limited leak of a Chinese local surveillance platform drawing off an apparently large national one has a special drop down for tracking for tracking foreign journalists in China… including me. @NetAskari found the data https://t.co/z6v9TrFiPe

[Zichen Wang @ZichenWanghere]

你们想多了。

[Matt DeButts @debutts]

@berber_jin1 but you're killing it!! i can't even keep track of your A1s!! 加油 加油 💪

[Jane Manchun Wong @wongmjane]

Using Chinese AI models for coding be like:

[Alex Dukalskis @AlexDukalskis]

If you are interested in academic research on this very subject, check out @ucdpolitics PhD candidate @LinetteMLim

here:

https://t.co/0UkUvtFFUg

and here:

https://t.co/5CJai66Pu7

[Emily Feng 冯哲芸 @EmilyZFeng]

Striking statement from China’s foreign press club, explicitly making clear its critique of China revoking visas, China detaining journos over coverage, not associated w/any media outlet. Media orgs - powerful ones - are not speaking up, and they should. https://t.co/9mHTBQKKDN

[Emily Feng 冯哲芸 @EmilyZFeng]

Excited to share that the Mandarin-language version of my book is being published April 1 in Taiwan !

[Yiqing Xu @xuyiqing]

I’m hiring a predoc starting this summer. The focus is building AI workflows to improve research efficiency.

More importantly, I value independent thinking and ambition. You do not need to fit into a narrow topic.

If you’re interested in applied statistics, causal inference, or Chinese politics, broadly defined, plz apply. You can propose your own project --- I will support it.

https://t.co/GFYCuBj1Gu

[Dan Wang @danwwang]

The quirky Ma Qianzu explains why the Chinese internet is so frustrating to read: there’s little actual analysis, only a straightjacketed state media and a proliferation of dramatic narratives

And a metaphor from a great interview by @afrazhaowang
https://t.co/vFwcUxo5HP

[Jennifer Pan @jenjpan]

New paper with @xuxupolitics in @PNASNexus: China origin LLMs refuse political questions at dramatically higher rates than US models — BaiChuan refused 60% of prompts, DeepSeek 36%. This holds in Chinese and English, https://t.co/0a5Kq8FxtM

[Ross Dahlke 🔑 @Ross_Dahlke]

Thanks to UW IT for inviting me to present my Polymarket data collection pipeline at Google Cloud Platform Research Day. Pipeline enabled by cloud computing: $40B in volume, 500M trades, and 1.25M comments with continuous collection. Preprints and public datasets coming soon!

[Yiqing Xu @xuyiqing]

At this point, we should all pause on whatever we are doing---for a month---to reassess and redesign our workflow, then resume. ⏸️🛠️▶️

I know this is difficult, but the payoff will be large.

[Chinese Politics Research in Progress @CPRPVirtual]

Join us on February 13 (Friday) at 1pm EST for a presentation on “Media Patronage: How Authoritarian Regimes Exploit Media Competition to Shape Global Information“ by @debutts and @jenjpan. Discussants: @MariaRepnikova and @dstreisman. Zoom link: https://t.co/HU6hUW2NhY

[afra wang @afrazhaowang]

for the latest @WIRED issue, I wrote about China’s Industrial Party movement and its signature intellectual product, Morning Star of Lingao, a sprawling, effectively never-ending sci-fi project created collaboratively on the Chinese internet. The premise is wild: 500 people time-travel back to the Ming dynasty to industrialize China.

in the piece, I mentioned that there was no English translation to be found. Well, it turns out that wasn’t entirely true.

someone took it on as a passion project, translated the canonical chapters (with Gemini 2.5 Pro), built a GitHub repo covering all 2,876 chapters, and even created a dedicated website for the translated version.

links in reply.

[Yingdan_Lu @YingdanL_kk]

Postdoc Opportunity at @NorthwesternU @NU_SoC @BuffettInst! Our Global LLM Values Benchmarking Working Group is seeking a postdoc starting Summer 2026. If you are working on LLMs and computational social science, this may be for you. Apply by Jan 16, 2026👉[email protected]

[Matt DeButts @debutts]

UM is lucky to have him!!!

[Alex Spangher @ Neurips2025 @AlexanderSpangh]

✨ Very overdue update:

I'll be starting as an Assistant Professor in CS at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Fall 2026. I will be recruiting PhD students!!

Please help me spread the word! [Thread] 1/n

[Alicia R. Chen @AliciaRrChen]

Big thanks to @perryworldhouse and @ForeignAffairs for this honor! I'm excited to share my research on how China is (and isn't!) using aid for influence in international organizations with a broader audience.

[Ava Hu @avahu6]

It’s been a while since I last reported in Chinese! And if you haven’t heard: foreign labor in the U.S. now comes with a $100,000 price tag. Here’s the story behind it: https://t.co/bRm8gno45L

#h1b

[Matt DeButts @debutts]

So excited to be joining @StanfordData! My ~data science~ journey continues (but still a journalist at heart! "别忘初心" as they say) https://t.co/AM2Jbja7f8

[tall girl on netflix @clairejiacries]

my novel is out today. here I am, holding the last draft and the first draft, 10 years apart. thank you, thank you all for reading 🏡🩷